After working with WordPilots for several years, the airport ground support equipment supplier ITW GSE has realised impressive savings of as much as 75% on certain translation assignments. To date, the Funen-based company has saved a six-figure sum on their translations of documentation and marketing material. At the same time, the linguistic quality has become markedly better, enabling customers to understand the texts more easily.“Our collaboration is perfect,” says Pernille Ingemann Bo from ITW GSE.
ITW GSE is an international company based in Odense which produces and sells power supply and air-conditioning equipment for aircraft worldwide. The company therefore needs documentation and marketing material in several languages, texts which were originally translated by ITW GSE’s own sales agents at the company’s offices around the world.
However, as the sales agents are not linguists, and because translation is not their core expertise, the whole process was extremely time-consuming. ITW GSE found that the translated texts lacked both coherence and clarity. On top of this, ITW GSE had to start translating each text from scratch every time, while the texts lacked consistency – for example due to inconsistently translated technical terms.
Efficient processes systematise the translation work
In 2015, WordPilots started translating technical documentation and marketing material into numerous languages for ITW GSE. We were convinced that we could improve the linguistic quality of ITW GSE’s texts and systematise the entire translation process. Therefore, the first thing we did was to create a translation memory for each of ITW GSE’s 22 target languages.
A translation memory is a special bilingual database where the translated texts are stored for reuse. This ensures that words and phrases are translated in the same way each time, so that when doing updates, it is only necessary to translate new text. This minimises the need to translate all the material each time, and as the price of a translation depends on how much text actually has to be translated, the more text there is in the translation memory, the bigger the discount.
To ensure terminological consistency in the company’s manuals and a high level of linguistic quality across the board, WordPilots helped ITW GSE to prepare termbases of their core terminology.
Savings of up to 75% and high quality
After several years of working with WordPilots, ITW GSE has achieved clear results: Savings of as much as 75% on some of translations, and total savings running into six-figure sums for all their translation assignments to date.
In addition to the financial savings, ITW GSE has achieved better and more consistent quality. “We value WordPilots, because they ensure high-quality and consistently translated technical documentation with a professional feel. Our customers receive documentation which is correctly translated, which improves their understanding of the technical content,” says Pernille Ingemann Bo from ITW GSE. “If we want to make changes to some of our technical terms, the revisions are implemented in the database in one fell swoop, so that the new term is used consistently by everyone from that point on.”
Professional translation key in a global world
For Danish companies acting in a global world, communication plays a crucial role. If you need to publish technical documentation or provide information about your product to end-users in a global market, translation is an all-important service. Translating in-house may seem an easy and inexpensive solution, but it often pays to have translation work done by a professional language service provider – in terms of both price and quality.
WordPilots’ collaboration with ITW GSE is a classic example of just that, and ITW GSE is very happy with the results so far. “We’re extremely happy with our cooperation with WordPilots,” says Pernille Ingemann Bo in conclusion.
